


The Music of the Ainur is a lie that Eru Ilúvatar tells himself because he can not bear to know the void.

by Slant



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Existentialism, Gen, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:58:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom Bombadil chooses to be a merry fellow. It is how he strives to create purpose in a life that has none.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"One day I saw a Hobbit being swallowed by a tree. It was trapped and panicking. It hollered and yelled for a time and then its struggles became weaker. Soon, all was silent in the green woods. I have never told this story to anyone."  
"I watch you in your struggle to survive, Old Man Willow, and I feel nothing. Perhaps I will pull the fly from the spiders web; perhaps I will not. The choice does not signify, and it is not for the spider or the fly to make. It is for me, and either way, it is of no consequence."  
"Getting these Hobbits out of you will fill me with ennui, and I will tell you about it. I will also tell you how photosynthesis is the hopeless, fearful routine of a tree clinging to an existence that it cares nothing for."

After Old Man Willow let them out, Tom Bombadill introduced himself saying, "Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless. Neither star nor acorn nor fearlessness did or shall last long, but the darkness will remain, until it to falls once more into the void."  
"But come! I eke what meaning I can from song and good fellowship, so be my guests this night, and in the morning I shall speed you on your way."

He lead them down to his house by the Withywindle, and as he strode, he sung great booming cheerful songs, declaiming his identity to the distant, incurious stars.

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,  
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. 

He feasted them that night. Frodo, in an excess of paranoia, put on the ring and hid himself, and Tom looked straight at him and said, "Dominion over all peoples for all time is a grandiloquent dream made risible by its pathetic narrowness of vision. You need not hide the ring from me for I know it's possession to be a fatuous gesture."  
Goldberry interupted at this point, explaining that the Hobbits could of course chose to find meaning in quests to deliver jewelry to Elves who already had a more than adequate supply if they wanted to, but that Tom had long ago decided that the struggle for dominion is a puerile conceit unworthy of any serious sapient. Frodo, much abashed, took the ring off and settled down to his third dinner of the evening. 

With an excess of hospitality, Tom rose at dawn to see them well provisioned and sent them off onto the downs with a song that, he said, he would hear if it were sung within the old forest. This lead to a rather embarrassing _faux pas_ when they were captured by Barrow-wights: Frodo recited the doggerel and Tom turned up and invited the Barrow-wights back to his house for a night of feasting. The last the Hobbits heard of them as they faded into the darkness was, "To be a barrow weight is to cling to existence when everything that is would deny it of you. It is to take being over non-being at any cost and against all things. Yours is the strongest answer to the problem of suicide."

The Hobbits helped themselves to grave goods and went on their way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disturbingly, I think Goldberry has a larger part in this than in the original :(


	2. But to men he gave strange gifts, which even the Powers will come to envy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A life is no less futile for being long.

It was the last age of the Earth. The great struggles of the early ages were long over; Morgoth and Sauron were memories faded with disuse and tinged with the accomplishment of their defeat. The Elves had gone West or dwindled fading into the twilight of the woods. Men had raised their mighty cities and temples, struggled for control thereof, lived and died and invented free-market capitalism, a beast more ravenous than ever Ungoliant was, yet bound by regulatory frameworks.  
Men and their works had passed away, leaving broken masonry and rubble that the green grass had reclaimed.  
And the green grass passed away and the years grew longer, for the Sun was tiring in her track and the Moon was small and distant and the Music of the Ainur was fading, and Tom envied the Elves who had gone beyond and the Men with their strange Gift, and lived on where the greenwood had been long ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read the Silmarillion once, about ten years ago but the two quotes that I made the title from had stuck wih me.


End file.
